Image: Alvin Luong, A Voluminous Crush (detail), 2021–2022. Courtesy of the artist
2023 Eco-Art Exhibition
With the Land
At No.9 Gardens
July 29 – October 1, 2023
Self Guided Tours: 10am – 5pm. Saturdays and Sundays
Agnes and No.9 Gardens co-present With the Land, an exhibition set in the secluded golden fields at No.9 Gardens, 40 minutes outside Kingston. Works emerge in the lush outdoor trails, meandering riverbanks and wilflower fields, including those by Andy Berg, Elaine Chan-Dow, Chaka Chikodzi, Francisco Corbett, Sadiqa de Meijer, Elvira Hufschmid, Alvin Luong, Jill Price and the Along the Way Playgroup [Michelle Bunton, Sebastian De Line, Sadiqa de Meijer, Shelby Lisk, JP Longboat (lead artist), Marney McDiarmid, Andrei Pora, Clelia Scala and Sheldon Traviss].
With the Land is part of the Cloud 9 Electronic Music & Eco Art Festival, a one-of-a-kind youth-led event that aims to promote climate action through music, art and community.
Exhibition is co-presented by Agnes Etherington Art Centre and No.9 and curated by Sunny Kerr, Curator of Contemporary Art at Agnes. Exhibition is open free to public for self-guided tours Saturdays and Sundays 10am-5pm July 29th to October 1st.
Alvin Luong
A Voluminous Crush, 2023
banner, wooden frame
A Voluminous Crush is made to appear as if a real estate development billboard has been soiled by a rising flood. Alvin Luong depicts his family home in the outskirts of Ho Chi Minh City with an encroaching green tide. Within it are hundreds of drawings of the Southeast Asian vegetable rau muong, also known as river spinach; once rationed to his family in the aftermath of the Vietnam War, it will be a protagonist in coming climate change crisis.
Alvin Luong works with stories of human migration, land, and dialogues from diasporic working class communities to create artworks that reflect upon historical development and its intimate effects on the lives of people. His focus is expressed through videos, photographs, and sculptures. Luong has shown and screened artworks in places including the Images Festival (Toronto), Boers-Li Gallery (Beijing), Gudskul (Jakarta), and The Polygon Gallery (Vancouver). The artist has held research and resident artist appointments at the Inside-Out Art Museum (Beijing), HB Station Contemporary Art Research Center (Guangzhou), the Art Gallery of Ontario (Toronto), and Gallery TPW (Toronto). The artist’s works have been acquired and shown by The Rockefeller Foundation (New York City).
Elvira Hufschmid
The Eyes of the Land, 2023
drawing installation, graphite on paper, chalk, mounts
Sensory drawings are recordings of perceptual processes that take place when visiting a distinct site or when sitting across from a tree or a plant. Elvira Hufschmid is a European multimedia artist and academic. Her extensive place-based conceptual drawing practice emerges from a deeply felt (inter)-relationality to the living earth and a sensory approach of communicating with the other-than-human world.
Elvira Hufschmid holds an MFA from the San Francisco Art Institute, US, and taught as a Visiting Artist at Emily Carr University and as a Guest Professor for ‘Artistic Transformation Processes’ at the Berlin University of the Arts, Germany. Hufschmid is currently a PhD candidate in the Queen’s University Cultural Studies program with a focus on “aesthetic transformation” processes as participatory strategies to investigate colonial property formation in Canada as well as to facilitate interdisciplinary collaborations between art and astroparticle physics.
Elaine Chan-Dow
From Land to Art: A Public Intervention with Natural Debris. A Participatory Artistic Exploration of Microbial Communication, 2023
posts, cattail and honey suckle twine
Mycelium “threads” create large underground networks in forests and other plant communities when they spread and join with plant roots. These mycorrhizal networks connect individual plants together, meaning that not only are they critical to supplying nutrients that keep our forests healthy, but they also enable communication. Through webs of interconnected natural ropes, viewers are invited to engage in a tactile exploration that reflects this hidden world. Through their active engagement, the public can shape and influence the direction of the installation. As an artist, farmer and scholar, Chan-Dow believes that fostering a sense of connection, collective action and stewardship towards the natural world is crucial for the sustainability of our planet and its inhabitants.
Elaine Chan-Dow, a Toronto-based photographer and multi-disciplinary artist, delves into the convergence of behavioural science, botany, and art. With degrees in Urban Geography, Image Arts, and a Master of Fine Art, Elaine's previous work examined the intricate relationship between memory, objects, and individuals with impaired cognitive abilities. Her current work highlights the interconnection of art, humanity, and the natural world for biodiversity preservation and environmental sustainability. Elaine's conceptual works have been showcased at institutions and in private collections, including her latest public installation at Butterfield Park, OCAD University. She is currently a PhD candidate in Cultural Studies at Queen’s University.
Sadiqa de Meijer
The Ones That Made Landfall, 2023
repurposed cotton and polyester fabric
With The Ones That Made Landfall, Sadiqa de Meijer recognizes the duality of species introduced to North America, their enriching fertile qualities and their destructive potential. The installation mimics their often brash and passionate importation, against the slower settler logistics that attempt to “affix English to the land with fences.”
de Meijer's latest books are the language memoir alfabet/alphabet and the poetry collection The Outer Wards. With Amy Rubin, she formed the artist duo The Woolgatherers, practicing textile and performance arts. de Meijer's writing has won the Governor General's Literary Award, the CBC Poetry Prize, Arc's Poem of the Year Award, and other honours. Recurring themes in her work include landscape, language, decolonization, migration, and spirituality. She lives in Katarokwi/Kingston, where she is currently Poet Laureate.
Along the Way Playgroup
Michelle Bunton, Sebastian De Line, Sadiqa de Meijer, Shelby Lisk, JP Longboat (lead artist), Marney McDiarmid, Andrei Pora, Clelia Scala, and Sheldon Traviss, Along these Waterways Lodge, 2023, saplings, twine, wild clay, solar lamp
This lodge constructed in a traditional Haudenosaunee fashion will be gradually cladded with story tiles fired with “wild” clay from No.9 Gardens. The Along the Way Playgroup seeks to be guided by and in conversation with place, to come to terms with the original history of the areas at intersections of water and land—where we are on Turtle Island. Then, to practice a mindset of reciprocity with the waterways and their many living spiritual beings, this group of artists has been meeting at key sites in Kingston and the Rideau Lakes watershed. They focus on land-based artistic practices and witnessing the land from the perspective of First Nations and the clan animals, seeking to hear the stories from the legacy of cultural inter-relation spanning thousands of years on these waterways.
Funded by the Ontario Arts Council, the playgroup is a partnership-building project with Queen’s University Biological Station and the City of Kingston, Cultural Service and is facilitated by Sonia Nobrega, Senior Manager, QUBS, and Taylor Norris, Public Art Coordinator, City of Kingston, along with Agnes’s Curator of Contemporary Art, Sunny Kerr.
This summer (2023), the artists and partners close their circle, ending three years of seasonally timed activities with public, site-based events. These take place at No.9 Gardens and Arbour Ridge Park, Kingston.
Chaka Chikodzi
The Beyond, 2023, cobalt stone; Mind's Eye 1, 2023, serpentine stone; Inner Workings, 2023, serpentine stone; Mind's Eye 2, 2023, cobalt stone; Embeddedness, 2023, cobalt stone
Chaka Chikodzi works with volcanic rock from Zimbabwe; in his sculptures, the stone is a historical material that tells a story about the past as well as the future. Through these works, Chikodzi invites audiences to imagine new ways of belonging, marking time, and making our presence felt in the future.
Chikodzi is a Zimbabwean-Canadian stone sculptor based in Kingston. He began sculpting as a teenager and has a studio in Kingston and in Mvurwi, Zimbabwe, where he works with a team of assistants. His work is inspired by the beauty and simplicity of the natural rock formations that are unique to Zimbabwe’s landscape. Working with Zimbabwean stone here in Canada, he has become increasingly interested in the stone itself—in the story it tells about geological history and in the relationship that he has forged with it over years of living between two continents.
Andy Berg
Etheric Interlude, 2023
found objects, coil-built clay objects, local eastern white cedar field table
Etheric Interlude is a procession of sculptural “movements” that emerges from Andy Berg’s method of “walking and ingathering” and reconnecting through a framework of holism. We encounter signs of waning conventions with some retro oak objects meeting the gaze of patriarchal myths (movement 1). Further along the trail (movement 2) is a "witnessing space to plumb self and Earth" that free associates and gathers in “closeness to the water, trees and sky” (movement 2). Presently, a field table of raw cedar supports clay container-archetypes which co-exist, in Berg’s terms, “as thoughtforms in assembly with the land" (movement 3).
Andy Berg is a Settler whose practice acknowledges the life, history and culture of the land. Berg cites the influence upon her work of numerous enriching encounters, such as teaching arts and crafts at the former prison for women, serving as a community member for the Ontario Provincial Board of Parole, Eastern Region, returning to higher education later in life to complete her BFA at Queen’s University in 2008, working as the Unitarian Community Lay Chaplain, officiating for diverse rites of passage, including some of the first legal same-sex marriages in Kingston, and many more. These encounters assist her with working through the domains of artistic walking, feminism, ecology, Truth and Reconciliation, as well as holistic, often disputed therapeutic disciplines.
Jill Price
We Are Forest, 2023
reclaimed wood desk, wood chair, wood bookshelf, books about trees, wood pencils, and seed paper postcards
Jill Price invites you take some quiet time to sit down and write a letter to or on behalf of trees. Price is developing an un/making methodology to draw attention to how "all art is land art." She works at the intersection of drawing, sculpture, performance, digital media, and speculative fiction to explore the material entanglements of human and more-than-human lives. At her best when surrounded by plants, sipping a buttery chardonnay, and on a sunny step with a neighbourhood cat, Jill Price is an interdisciplinary Canadian artist of German, Scottish, Welsh and Ashkenazi descent grateful to be living on the traditional territory of the Anishinaabe and Wendat Nation, in Barrie, Ontario. She is an award-winning mixed media artist and scholar currently in the final stages of a SSHRC-funded research-creation PhD in Cultural Studies at Queen’s University. Price holds a BFA and B.Ed. from Western University and was awarded a 2016 Social Studies and Humanities Research Grant, 2017 Michael Smith Foreign Study Bursary, and the 2017 Research & Writing Award for her OCADU MFA thesis “Land as Archive.”
Francisco Corbett
I am here. Please accept me, I accept you, 2023
acrylic, spray paint and lacquer on plywood, performance
Representing fears and reveries of the forest, Francisco Corbett conceives of his installation as a set for a performance.
Francisco Corbett is a visual and performance artist based in Kingston, Canada. He is the director of an art studio, FORWORLD, and his practice focuses on building community and empowering young people. Corbett has been practicing professionally for fewer than 5 years but promises a relentless effort of creation to viewers and fans of his artwork.
Eco-Art Exhibition Opening – July 29th 2023
PARTNERS
SPONSORS
This project is funded by a Regional Tourism Ontario Partnership grant, Canada Council for the Arts and City of Kingston Arts Fund.
